Raise Your Credit Score FAST | Part 2

We also made the conscious decision to pay off every single delinquent account on his credit report.

It only came to a couple of thousand dollars of old debt (several years old), which was still a lot to us, but it needed to be done. I hear that Dave Ramsey actually has a lot of really great advice on how to do this if you feel like your total debt is way too high to even attempt to pay off. He breaks it down into easy-to-follow baby steps.

The collection agency contact information is located on your credit report.

A few months ago (before we moved), we called all of our creditors in one morning.

Before we even admitted we owed the money or offered to make a payment we asked each agency if they would delete our delinquent account from our credit report if we paid.

We pretty much got a "we can't promise you anything" from each collection agent.

Antonio and I looked at each other over the kitchen table and sighed. So many of the credit repair websites I had read said that this wouldn't be an issue and that the agency's would be so excited and happy to remove it from our report.

Hmmm...this wasn't working like we thought.

But we knew that we owed it.

(if something on your credit report is wrong and you don't actually owe the amount they are saying that you do, you can dispute it!! Definitely check out that option if you find an indiscrepency on your report!! You should see either a link or other contact information of how to dispute an item with the credit agency on your credit report itself)

We knew that it had to paid, regardless of whether or not it would be removed. Most of them wouldn't be automatically deleted from his report for several more years (there is a statute of limitations on how long an unpaid bill can sit on your credit report. Usually around 7 years. Then it gets automatically deleted. However, if you contact them or make even one payment within that time frame...it starts the whole 7 years over again. I've also heard that if they sell your account to another collection agency, it also restarts the 7 years, so be wary), which we couldn't afford to wait for if we were hoping to get a house any time in the next few years.

So we paid them even though the best response we got was "we might look into requesting that the credit reporting agencies remove it from your report in a few months". What did we have to lose?

So we paid them and waited.

And then we got this house on a 2-yr lease, which turns out to be a great thing because it's cheaper than our trailer's rent, and we're able to work on our credit over the next 2 years, so that we'll be able to buy our forever home when our lease is over!

Great plan, right?

But...how did it really turn out?

Did doing any of this actually help our credit?

Or did it just make a bigger mess of things?

Find out the results in Part 3 of this series!!

Coming soon!!

Have you ever hired a company to repair your credit?? Was it worth it in your opinion or would you go about doing it yourself if you could redo the experience? Let me know in the comments!